Though Cary Grant has top billing, the real star is Audrey Heburn as Reggie Lampert, a lovely British gal on holiday. She returns home to find that her new husband, Charlie, is dead. More confused than upset, Reggie slowly learns that Charlie is not the man she thought he was. Apparently, poor Charlie (thrown from a train in the film’s ominous pre-credits sequence) had numerous identities, and was in possession of a quarter of a million dollars when he died. Now everyone wants Reggie to help then find the money, though she insists she has no idea where it is. CIA men like Walter Matthau want the money, because they say Charlie was a criminal. Shady guys like James Coburn and a one-handed George Kennedy claim it’s theirs. And then there’s handsome and mysterious Peter Joshua (Grant) who seems so innocent and kind that he most certainly has to be hiding something.

From there, the movie instigates a relentless chase for this most MacGuffin-like of moneys. There are numerous switch-ups and double- and even triple-identities. But CHARADE, from a sharp script by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, manages to turn the endless plot complications into a logical storyline. Nothing feels forced, and even the final twists make sense. For his part, the unfairly talented Donen provides a number of unforgettable visuals, from a corpse-eye view of a morgue drawer closing, to a climactic chase edited to and punctuated by the visual rhythm of passing pillars. In his finest moment, he culminates a very complex movie in a nail-biter of a standoff -- two characters, both holding a third at gunpoint for very different reasons. Every bad review cliché in the book applies to this sequence: “You’ll be on the edge of your seat!” or “Hold on for the surprise twist ending!” except here, the boisterous exclamations are rather appropriate.

Grant was nearly sixty when he made CHARADE, though you’d be hard-pressed to guess it from the way he looked. He would retire after just two more films because, as the legend goes, he wanted to remain forever young in the minds of his audience. He does seem slightly uncomfortable sharing romantic scenes with a woman nearly half his age, but the film makes it pretty clear that he’s not particularly into her. Oh, how times change. Today, such May-December romances are common – 1999’s ENTRAPMENT featured a nearly seventy-year-old Sean Connery sexing up a thirty-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones. Then again, maybe that’s just her bag, since she married the almost sixty-year-old Michael Douglas a short time later.